Reclamation
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash, oneshot. Draco has come to claim his memories. Complete.


**Title: **Reclamation

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **PG

**Word Count**: ~3000

**Challenge: **for snottygrrl

_Keywords: _horses, roses, tea

_Dialogue: _"I'm not sure you really want me to answer that."

**Summary: **Draco has come to claim his memories.

**Author's Notes: **No beta on this, sorry. Only warning is for angst.

**Reclamation**

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

Draco smiled faintly and didn't look back at Harry. He stood just inside the gates of Malfoy Manor, near the old rosebushes that his mother had planted when she came to the Manor on her marriage with Lucius. He twirled one of the roses between his fingers. Pale blue, shading into white, like the center of a flame.

_Wanting has nothing to do with it, _he thought, and laid the rose carefully on the grass, as if he stood above one of his parents' graves. Then he stood up and faced Harry, who looked at him with a wrinkled brow that almost hid his scar and the green eyes wide with apprehension. Draco wobbled under a wave of affection so intense it made him dizzy. No, Harry didn't understand Draco's need to return to the house where he had suffered so much during the war, and he wasn't shy about showing it. But he had come to support Draco, and he would do it, no matter how unhappy he was about it.

"Yes, I am," Draco said softly, and offered his arm. Harry took it after a moment of hesitation, and they went up the long, twisting gravel walk together.

*

Their first stop was in the small garden that had been planted under his mother's window. _Had been planted. _Draco had to think of it like that, because he couldn't remember who had planted it. The garden wasn't really part of either his early memories or the memories of the tortured summer he had lived here under Voldemort's control. So it could have been house-elves, or it could have been his mother, or it could have been his parents working together.

_Could have been, but probably wasn't. _Draco didn't agree with Granger's ranting about house-elves and never would, but one thing it had taught him was that the elves were everywhere and doing things that most wizards would have claimed as their own accomplishments without thinking twice.

Still, because he didn't know, he could think of it as his parents' work, and it meant the same thing. He moved forwards, stepped over the collapsed remains of a fence, and stopped in the middle of the withered plants and tangled weeds. He extended his hands, as if he could encompass the whole of the garden that way, and looked slowly from side to side.

The exotic flowers that Narcissa had loved had died. They needed magic to survive an English winter. Draco could just see the petals that must have been blood-red once, crumpled and brown now under the swelling, triumphant green of moss. And she had trained a tall flower to climb the fence; now the vines clacked together like Lucius's tongue against his teeth, whilst in the middle of them and around them and growing through the place where the roots once would have clung were ordinary morning glories, their blossoms so small Draco had to look twice to see them.

The custom-made wooden furniture where Draco and Narcissa had sat more than once to have tea was warped and rotting. The metal benches were stained with rust, and the weeds overgrew them eagerly. That was the most unforgivable thing, Draco thought absently. He could understand the ways of nature taking over again; there was nothing _un_natural or malicious in that. But he couldn't bear the thought of the world being happy without his parents, without him, without the presence of Malfoys on the land. It made him want to clear the garden of intrusive life with fire. He clutched his wand.

Harry's hand came to rest in the small of his back.

Draco drew in a deep breath and removed his hand from his wand again. Yes, Harry was right. There was no reason to go mad in the garden. It was only a small part of his heritage, and not the most important.

He reclaimed it now by staring at the chairs and stripping away the vines in his mind, remembering the way Narcissa had sat there and talked in such a soft voice that Draco was disposed to give her less credit than he should when he was listening. He would lean his head back and stare at the brilliant blue sky—kept that way by the Malfoy weather wards—and let her voice became a murmuring stream in the background. And yet she had taught him the theory of advanced charms that way, and the theory behind Animagi transformations, and many Potions ingredients. They were repeated so many times that they stayed in the back of his mind when she finished speaking, and he found them there when he wanted them, grafted naturally into what he had thought was the uncaring soil of his thoughts.

That was the tribute to her, and the reminder of her garden, that he would carry with him.

He turned around. This time, he took Harry's hand to step over the fence.

*

Draco walked through the front door without pausing. There was nothing in the entrance hall that needed remembering.

Or, rather, there were too many things, images blending together and shivering and splintering apart into endless nightmares of terror. Draco was more interested in the dining room, and in his father's room. He opened the door into the dining room and turned smartly left to enter it, hearing Harry follow him, as faithful as his shadow.

And there was the table, where more than once Draco had seen Nagini feast on a captured prisoner.

He caught himself with his hands on the doors as a wave of dizziness overtook him. The room, pale with the marbling spells his parents had introduced in an effort to cover up the stains of spilt blood and soiled skin, spun around him into a blur of white. Draco tried to convince himself there was no giant snake currently crawling into the middle of the table, but his mind and his eyes saw differently.

Harry clasped his arms around Draco's waist and pressed a kiss to the back of his neck.

Draco arched his head back and put a hand over Harry's cheek. His eyes closed. He stood there, in the comfort of shared closeness and shared thoughts. He knew Harry must be thinking, as he was, how much had altered since that summer. Draco would never have come into this room, then, in the company of this man.

When he looked again, the room was empty of snakes. Draco stepped forwards so that he could walk to the head of the table, where Voldemort had often sat, and Harry came with him, arms not moving, his feet pacing Draco's step for step.

Draco crouched down to the height of a chair—the smaller furniture had been taken and packed away—and forced himself to look down the table, the way that Voldemort would have looked. He imagined his teenage self on one side, stunned into silence by the force and speed with which his family's prized sanctuary had been invaded.

No, not stunned. _Scared._

His parents hadn't been able to protect him. Draco knew all the while that Voldemort's acceptance of Snape's killing Dumbledore was the only thing that prevented him from killing Draco for failing in his task, and Voldemort was mad. His pleasure, his good will, his acceptance, could fail at any time.

He had agonized over how he was going to survive, and begged his parents to give him reassurances, and screamed at them when all those reassurances rang false, the way that, of course, they inevitably would.

He had curled up at night and brooded bitterly on how in the world Lucius could ever have chosen to serve the Dark Lord—whilst at the same time scourging himself for his joy when he was first branded with the Dark Mark. He'd picked at the Mark with carefully chosen spells until his mother found out and forced him to stop with her tears.

He'd become Voldemort's pet, and his favorite torturer next to Fenrir Greyback, because Voldemort could clearly see how much Draco didn't relish the task, so ordering Draco to cast the Cruciatus Curse allowed Voldemort to torture two people at once.

He remembered that, and the memories swam through his head and circled back and filled him with dizziness and stole his breath.

And all the while, Harry's strong, secure arms around his waist held him in place.

Draco stood up when he was done with his memory-gazing, and caught Harry close, and kissed him, a sight that the staid white walls and the large table had certainly never witnessed before.

*

And the next stop was Lucius's room, his private study, more strongly identified with him than his bedroom ever could be.

Draco paused on the threshold and looked around slowly. He had never actually seen the inside of this room when his father could have warded it. Lucius had said that he kept the most dangerous Dark Arts books in here, and that Draco needed to have no knowledge of them in case the Aurors ever raided the Manor. But Draco had thought, towards the end of his year under Voldemort's domination, that Lucius simply didn't want his son using the Dark Arts against anyone else.

_He didn't want me serving Voldemort, either, _Draco thought. _Why was he allowed to make the strange or stupid choices and I wasn't_?

But the next moment he had shaken his head and walked further into the room. He wasn't here to debate the ethics of right and wrong with the ghosts in his head, a debate he always lost. He was here to reclaim.

And make recompense, perhaps, if any could be made when the person could no longer hear you make it.

Lucius's private study had bookshelves, as promised, but only on three walls. The fourth was occupied by the largest enchanted window Draco had ever seen, pouring a flood of imaginary sunlight into the room. The light sparkled on the cherry-wood furniture and the silver handles of the desk drawers and made them seem frowsy and dull by comparison. But Draco's eye was caught more by the shapes running in the window. He took a few steps closer, and then halted, mouth open.

The shapes plunging through the green meadow the window gazed on were white horses. But they were horses of the sort that didn't exist in the real world, with necks like swans' and long curved legs, their manes drifting behind them in too-slow torrents of white like foam. When they halted and turned around, pawing the ground, Draco could clearly see that they had silver hooves and eyes.

It was the kind of thing a Gryffindor schoolgirl might have conjured for herself, once she had mastered the necessary spells. Draco had long suspected that there was something in here other than the Dark Arts books Lucius was ashamed of, but never once had he thought it might be innocence.

Harry came up behind him again and leaned his chin on his shoulder. A moment later, Draco heard a soft curse, the first words Harry had spoken since they stepped onto the Manor property.

Draco gave a faint smile and reached up to run his fingers along Harry's jawline. "What new heinous act of ours makes you sound like that?"

"I'm not sure you really want me to answer that."

Curious now, Draco twisted around to face him. "I do."

Harry avoided his gaze for the barest moment. He really was too courageous for his own good, Draco thought, as Harry looked directly into his eyes and answered, "I was just realizing that I was wrong about your father. I had thought he was evil all the way through. And, well, he was only _mostly_ evil."

Draco cupped a hand fully around Harry's jaw and stroked his cheek without answering. He felt a painful pulling at his own heart, and he wasn't sure if it was the urge to laugh or cry or laugh mockingly.

But he did know two things. First, the image of those horses would remain with him.

Second, he could not bear the look at the window again.

*

And his own room was their last stop.

Draco halted with his hand on the door for long moments, his breathing shallow and fast. He closed his eyes and swallowed, but that did nothing to erase the bitter, salty taste in his mouth. Harry's arms closed around his waist as though he were trying to hug away the pain.

Draco nearly smiled. Nothing could do that, but if something could, Harry would be the first person to try it.

And so he was able to open the door and enter the room.

It was full of shadows, and empty of personal belongings; Draco had taken as many as he could bear to with him when he moved to another house with his parents, and burned what was left. The bed remained, untouched by curtains, posts, pillows, blankets, or anything else that would have made it personal. Draco thought he should be able to look at it with unemotional, unaffected eyes.

And still he remembered the way that the second of his torture victims had looked, writhing there.

Voldemort had made him torture his victims in his own sanctuary.

He turned in slow circles, looking through the enchanted window. It pictured a nighttime forest, but now Draco couldn't see it without also seeing the slender dark figure silhouetted against it, and without hearing the hissing voice that had made sly promises to him for hours. The walls that had once carried a poster of the Falmouth Falcons and the practice wands of his childhood were bare now, but Draco had seen them splattered with blood, and he could not unsee it.

Draco thought for a moment of Neville Longbottom, whom he had come to know considerably better since the night when Harry had taken his hand, looked into his eyes, and asked him to stop pretending. Longbottom had walked across the battlefield where he'd nearly died and had beheaded Nagini without flinching. It didn't seem to trouble him. Less evil things had happened here, at least to Draco _personally, _and it was not as though he could seek out, make amends to, or apologize to every one of his victims. He wondered why this affected him so powerfully.

_I am not Longbottom._

Once he would have added, _Thank God_, to the end of that thought, but not now. Now he only leaned his hand on the wall, and his head on Harry's shoulder, and forced himself to breathe, slowly, deeply, regularly.

He called to the ghost of the lonely boy who still lived here, the memory who had tortured others, the shadow of his own innocence. And that boy blew towards him and blended into him, and Draco felt able to stand a little more upright.

*

They stepped out of the Manor's front doors onto the lawn, and Draco faced the house and cast, with a flick of his wand, the spell that he had come to make sure he was strong enough to perform.

A great slab of air above the house turned silver and solidified. As it fell, it coalesced into thick silken cables like spiderweb, and bound the house and gardens in a hefty cocoon. Draco took a step back as the cords arced towards him and Harry, but the spell worked as his mother had told him, once, it would: a clear path remained for them towards the gates. After that, the web would close down completely and exclude humans, along with dust and time and change, from the house, until someone of the Malfoy bloodline came to reverse it.

Draco remained where he was for a moment and surveyed the house in silence. He could feel his heartbeat steadying and his vision clearing, which didn't seem to have happened once since he entered the doors. Now he was master of the memories, and master of the house his fear had driven him out of. When he wanted to reopen it, he could, because he had reclaimed it from the shadows of the past first.

Harry's hand pressed on his shoulder. Draco turned to face him, looking into calm but concerned green eyes, and a face he had discovered during the last few years that he did not want to live without.

"You're all right now?" Harry asked in a whisper.

Draco reached out and clasped Harry around the shoulders, drawing him near. Harry came willingly, never breaking their gaze.

There was so much tension in the air between them, so many stories and memories of their own. Harry had taken his hand and asked Draco to face up to the _kind _of desire that lay between them, but Draco had done as much to urge Harry along the natural path—from friendship, where Harry had wanted to stop at first, to becoming lovers—and to help him brave the storm that had erupted when the press found out. Neither of them could have lived without the other, now, because they traded places regularly, one supporting and the other leading, and the other supporting and the one leading, strong and cyclic as a heartbeat.

Harry did not understand everything that had happened this day, Draco knew; Hogwarts had been his first home, and if his parents had had a tradition of family pride, he'd never known it. But he had held Draco up through the deaths of his parents, and for this, it didn't matter if he didn't understand completely. What mattered was his willingness to be here.

"All right," Draco echoed. _For the moment,_ his words left unsaid. _Not healed._

But Harry would understand that.

Harry brushed a kiss against his cheek, which Draco stood for with his eyelids drooping, feeling half-asleep. Then he slung his arm around Draco's shoulders, and they walked towards the gates.

**End.**


End file.
